The Importance of Roadway Safety

There are around 43,000 fatal crashes per year in the United States. For me, as a student driver who has only had his license for around a year, that is a scary statistic. A scary statistic, especially when the age group 16-19 has the highest crash rate in the U.S.. In fact, not only is it a scary number, it is a scary thought that haunts me everytime I take a seat behind the wheel. What if that 15,000 pound semi-truck were to blow that red light when I am making that left turn to get to school? What if I or my sisters were to get severely hurt, or worse? What if we were to be just another number to add to that statistic? All of this has lead me to truly value the importance of roadway safety and practices to avoid adding to that number. Furthermore, I believe that initiative should be taken to improve the quality of driver education and push for more safety oriented road infrastructure if we want a chance at combating that incomprehensibly large number of deaths.

Firstly, I believe the utmost effective and primary way to reduce the number of accidents on the roadway is through driver education. Statistically, better driver education is associated with lower occurrence of crashes and convictions, proving to be one of the most effective ways to decrease the likelihood of an accident. Unfortunately, right now in the U.S., driver education suffers with many difficulties and flaws, that being outdated programs and underfunded schooling. A vast portion of driver education is provided through public schools, that of which lack the funding to truly provide top of the line driver education. Not only that, but most driver education programs that are currently offered tend to be outdated in the face of the ever-expanding modern road infrastructure. Now that we have identified the issues, we can work towards the collective solution of giving driver education, in and outside of highschools, the proper funding that it needs, allowing for higher quality and more up to date education. I believe if taxes were better utilized with a larger portion being dedicated towards driver education and education as a whole, then it would help combat this grueling problem within the United States. Ultimately, this will work to make the roadway a much safer place for new and experienced drivers reducing accidents and fatalities.

Secondly, the second biggest impact on the number of fatalities on the road, is the design of the road. For example, back at my old neighborhood in which I grew up, there was a 4-way intersection that we had to pass to get to school. Unfortunately, this intersection tended to result in lots of car pooling and as a result, traffic. Due to the heavy traffic we would get during the mornings and later in the evening when everyone would come home from work, it would get much more dangerous. It got to a point at times in which we had three accidents within a single week. Clearly the design of the road didn’t comply with the traffic flow causing many issues. However, on the other end of the town, in place of a 4-way, there was a roundabout, a road phenomena that never seemed to get too stuffy with traffic. Not only that, but the roundabout never had any accidents throughout its entire 20 year lifespan. In general, certain types of road architectures tend to be more traffic oriented allowing for ease of access and safety for drivers alongside pedestrians. Perhaps, if we took more initiative in how we designed our roadways, we could implement generally safer and more efficient road architecture. Rather than cutting corners to avoid spending the extra buck, we could utilize past studies of traffic flow and road architecture to carefully plot out how we will design our future roads.

Finally, moving on to what truly engraved this issue within my head, an accident that I nearly got into, myself. It was later afternoon on a Friday, me and my sister were just pulling out of the gym from leg day (yes, we do leg day on fridays). We had to make a left turn to get out of the gym’s parking lot and onto the road. The road appeared to be clear other than a green jeep coming from our left, though they had their right blinker on. Unfortunately for us, it had been the case that they had left their blinker on from the previous turn, they barely missed us. Ultimately, it was somewhat of an eye opening experience, to think they could have rammed the side of our car. However, it made me lose my blind trust in others on the road, encouraging me to be more of a defensive driver, not purely relying on the signals of others in those situations but being more observant to their speed and other factors. That experience alone has led to me becoming more patient as a person, and waiting before acting, especially if my own or others’ well beings could be on the line.

I can’t urge enough the importance of safety on the road, and even as a pedestrian, life is precious and there is no point in losing it to a daily task. It is absurd how high the number of deaths from roadway accidents there are, and I believe it is our job as a society to not only work to reduce this number but maybe one day bring an end to it. As a nation, we must take initiative to combat this issue and work to make the road a safer place for us and our children.